We started out our day in the Crescent City by exploring the French Quarter.  A bit of aimless wandering and we found ourselves at Jackson Square, anchored by Saint Louis Cathedral, and also the location of the Louisiana State Museum.  There were two main exhibits in the museum; the first floor was a poignant remembrance of Hurricane Katrina from the tropical depression forming over the Bahamas all the way through landfall, flood control failure, personal struggles, recovery, urban replanning, forecasting science, and the engineering of present and potentially future flood control systems, while the second floor held a much more upbeat exhibit about the history of Mardi Gras and carnivals in New Orleans, including turn-of-the-century dance cards and invitations to the krewes’ formal balls.

     Leaving the museum we realized that we were getting a bit hungry for a late lunch, so our wandering began to include looking for a place to eat.  After seeing more of the French Quarter, and even walking the famous Bourbon Street, we ended up at Johnny’s Po-Boys, consistently named one of the best po-boy restaurants in the city.  The reviews did not lie, and our po-boys were delicious.  After this mid-afternoon meal we wanted to rest for a bit, and headed back to the hotel to take advantage of the pool/hot tub/sauna and again watched the sun set over the Mississippi River from our room.

     Refreshed and ready for a night out, we went downstairs, where we enjoyed bar food and cocktails at the Café Adelaide and Swizzle Stick Bar.  The shrimp and tasso corndogs, shrimp and okra gumbo, and bacon encrusted oysters paired with an Adelaide Swizzle and a Sazerac made for a perfect last dinner in New Orleans (this time around).

     From the hotel, we walked through the French Quarter, where many bars and shops were already closed, for some reason we have yet to figure out.  So, we headed for the music of Frenchmen Street, where we first went to the Spotted Cat Music Club.  The Smokin' Time Jazz Club was playing in the window of the intimate club while swing dancers showed off their best moves on the floor.  At the Spotted Cat, we met up with Charla’s classmate Paul, who is at the end of his forty-five-day journey around America on Amtrak, and his friends Kunal and Erin.  While the band took a break, we stepped across the street to Café Negril, where we caught their funk band’s last song as they closed shop for the evening.  Walking back towards the River, we found the Balcony Music Club, where a fantastic band was still rocking the house.  Their set mixed some classic jazz tunes you would expect to hear in NOLA with some funky brass/rock hiphop tunes, like a cover of “Get Low,” that surprised and delighted the crowd.  Our night started winding down, as we hung out at Molly’s to swap travel stories and then made our way to Café du Monde for a late night bag of beignets, which we ate as we walked back to the Loews.

     From the Kisatchie National Forest, we drove through the bayou to reach I-49 again and continuing heading south, bringing us to Alexandria.  We made a loop that took us by the airpark and into town for gas and breakfast.  About another hour south of Alexandria on I-49, we faced a decision in Lafayette:  go further south to Avery Island or get on I-10 to go to Abita Springs.  Chase made a few phone calls to reach the Abita Brewery and check their tour times, revealing that we would have to make Abita a stop on Wednesday if we wished to participate.  So, we kept going south to the beautiful Avery Island, home of the McIlhenny family’s famous Tabasco sauce.  To get on the island, we were stopped at a small tollbooth (well, really more of a tollhouse, like the cookie!), where a kind gentlemen asked for our dollar fee to support the wildlife conservation efforts and extended a stick with a clothespin on the end to exchange a card for our toll fee.

     On Avery Island, we went on a Tabasco factory tour that included a guided exhibit and a short video before we filed past the bottling line.  Though our hostess gave us two small bottles of Tabasco each, the best part of the tour was just a few steps away at the country store, where we were able to sample Tabasco’s range of sauces as well as jalapeno ice cream.  Our favorite sauce was one of their newer products, the Sweet and Spicy Tabasco sauce, which Charla stocked up on for a shrimp boil in the very near future.

     In the country store, we met Kina, a lovely sales associate who answered all of our questions, including where to find the nearest Post Office.  Much of Avery Island (aside from the Tabasco property and something called Jungle Gardens) is restricted to residents only, but with Kina’s golden permission we were able to drive past the barricades to the Post Office.  The Avery Island Post Office is a small, vine-covered building, with a nice Postmaster who helped us out with a variety of requests as we overloaded her with postcards, letters, and packages we’d been meaning to send for a while.

     After leaving the restricted zone we jumped back on US90 to New Orleans and rolled into town in the mid-afternoon.  As a gift to make the end of our trip awesome, Charla’s dad gave us a couple nights’ stay at the Loews New Orleans.  We were greeted by the friendly staff outside who got a kick out of our vehicle that’s covered with dirt (and a few drawings in it), packed to the brim, and toting half of a bicycle.  Inside, the front desk welcomed us with cold cherry lemonade and a basket of Louisiana treats like Abita beer and Zapp’s Voodoo potato chips.  From there, we went up to the eighteenth floor, where our corner room offered nice views of the evening sun over the Mississippi River.

     We only stayed in the room a short time before heading out to wander about the city of New Orleans.  Coincidentally, on the way out the door the bellmen were just taking another vehicle with Alaska tags and “AK to FL” written on the windshield; come to find out we’re not the only guests in the hotel on this journey!  They were on day twenty of an Anchorage – Fort Walton Beach drive, but they had taken a more northern route than us.  After running into our “travel-mates” we continued on into the French Quarter to visit the Crescent City Brewhouse.  They’re slogan is “The food’s so good you’ll forgot you came for the beer,” which largely proved true with unremarkable brews but amazing crabmeat stuffed shrimp and shrimp and grits!  After dinner we decided to skip out on the wild-and-crazy French Quarter scene for the more sedate (and musically fascinating) scene on Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marginy neighborhood.  We started our evening at Maison, which was hosting its Super Jam Open Mic night; on stage there was a core band of saxophone, keyboards, drums, and guitar, but accompanied by a constantly rotating assortment of horn players and vocalists.  After a while of listening to different musicians, we moved a short way down the street to the Blue Nile where an extremely large and energetic brass band was rocking the night.

       We started day three by packing up wet gear thanks to a Dawson morning rain shower.  Once we got all of our wet gear stowed away for the trip, we got to once again jump on the ferry for our final water crossing of the Yukon River.  The ladies at the Visitor Center directed us to the cheapest gas in town, at an industrial Alberta Fuels cardlock system in a mining part of town.  After figuring out how to use the most obscure cardlock system in the world, we were finally zooming out of town on the Klondike Highway.  We stopped for lunch at Moose Creek, a nice campground though it was lacking the running water that it had advertised.  Without rinsing our dishes we were back on the road again.  We continued on to Carmacks for a gas stop, and much more excitingly, a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Mint Chocolate bar that was hiding in the gas station!  We stopped to enjoy some morsels of chocolate at Little Fox Lake, the scene of a catastrophic forest fire in 1998.  The landscape is still charred and recovering to this day.
     A few miles down the road we arrived at Lake Laberge.  We were on an overlook, not quite a marge, but it was still appropriate to have a reading of Robert Service's “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”  After the dramatic reading, we took a look around to discover we weren’t merely at an overlook, but we had somehow ventured into a Public Use Quarry, complete with three Caterpillar 776Bs with keys in the ignitions!  However tempted we were to rally, we settled with a photo shoot.  (Who knows how good the steering would be on a vehicle whose tires are taller than the trusty Pilot?!)_

_      Our quarry was quite close to Whitehorse, which features the Yukon Brewery (“Beer Worth Freezin' For”).  Unbeknownst to us we had stopped in on International IPA Day, a day we should all be celebrating.  After a bit of sampling we decided on a growler of Discovery Honey Ale and bottles of Ice Fog IPA and Midnight Sun Espresso Stout.